WC Monitor
5/29/2015
IN CONGRESS
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has scheduled a hearing for June 16 to again consider the nomination of Monica Regalbuto to serve as Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environmental Management. The White House earlier this year nominated Regalbuto for a second time to head up the Department of Energy’s cleanup program; she was first nominated last spring to fill the vacancy left when Ines Triay stepped down as Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management in July 2011 but her nomination was not fully acted on by the Senate before the end of the 113th Congress. At the time of her initial nomination last year, Regalbuto had been serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy for Fuel Cycle Technologies in DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy. However, she has since moved to take a senior management role in EM, and now serves as Associate Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary. Also to be considered during the June 16 hearing is the White House’s nomination of Jonathan Elkind to serve as Assistant Secretary of Energy for International Affairs.
IN DOE
The Department of Energy expects to release in July a final Request for Proposals for the new contract to operate the Department’s two depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion plants. The anticipated schedule was outlined in a presentation made at a pre-solicitation conference for the procurement held in late April and publicly released this week. The new contract is being competed on a full-and-open basis, and will have cost-plus-award-fee contract line item numbers (CLINs) to cover conversion operations; and firm fixed-price CLINs to cover cylinder management activities. DOE envisions the new contract running for up to five years, consisting of a three-year base period and a two-year option period. The two DUF6 conversion plants, located at DOE’s Portsmouth and Paducah sites, are currently managed by B&W Conversion Services, LLC, under a contract set to expire at the start of 2016.
